Comparisons and advocacy

Here's the short answer for us at this instant; full Common Cartridge support. Right now I'm not sure we can move a lot of our content over, but Angel has done a lot of work to get CC up and running in their latest versions.

We'll probably be running a test instance with a few profs over the next semester (depending on exactly what happens at the Angel users conference, going on right now) and I'll send whatever feedback we get to you. I'm most interested in the gradebook changes since we probably get more gradebook questions than anything, and faculty have an amazing variety of ways to grade. Angel is *very* flexible here, at the cost of being rather complex.

Martin - I have been speaking with a couple Jesuit universities and one of them makes use of Angel. In response here is a list of what they highlighted as features they like about Angel or would expect from Moodle. I have put in brackets how I think Moodle might address these.

1. Integration with PeopleSoft to create courses (not the content) and automatically add the students. The ability for faculty to copy their courses. [May require customization. Moodle allows for importing users and course enrollments via CSV files]

2. Offering the ability to enter departmental learning goals and course objectives and then map them to the course assignments / student learning artifacts to demonstrate curricular coherence as well as compliance with departmental requirements, and professional certification. [Moodle outcomes]

3. Electronic portfolios where students can add their artifacts, (documents, multimedia, images, diagrams, e.t.c.) to demonstrate competence (e.g. ABET compliance, teacher credentialing, etc.) extracurricular projects, reflections, work experience, resumes. Students should be able to have different versions of their portfolio, such as a learning, assessment, and professional portfolios. [Moodle and Mahara via MNet]

4. Social learning and networking tools such as blogs (opportunities for blog journaling, or analytical reviews), wikis, discussion forums, collaborative learning spaces, such as google docs. Opportunities for synchronous communications, ala Web CT. [Moodle has functionality for forums, wikis, blogs, whiteboarding with DimDim or elluminate, and Moodle 2.0 file API work for working with GoogleDocs and other respositories]

5. Electronic gradebooks that are flexible and will allow faculty to export them to Excel.[Gradebook 1.9 allows export to Excel (or OpenOffice)]

6. Rigorous assessment tools for online assessment offering question banks, student tracking, and secure web interface. Excellent data analysis of student responses for each question, for class performance and individual student performance.[Moodle has a question bank, quiz and lesson modules, choice and feedback modules, and of course Petr for security]

7. Electronic drop boxes, web spaces for student hypertexts, RSS feeds, multimedia lesson content. [Multimedia filter, RSS feed, and assignment modules provides this type of functionality]

8. iTunesU integration [CONTRIB block for iTunesU integration]

9. Exportability of courses both by faculty, and exportability of student work by students [Moodle backup works fine for the faculty; however, we are missing the ability to allow a student to backup his or her work. In part Mahara may help with this but this would be a new feature request]

10. Institutional ability to search student artifacts as evidence for accreditation [I am not 100% clear what this means but Moodle roles allows for customizing who can see and search for what - combined with outcomes I think this should not be too much of an issue]

11. Good query and report building utilities, from Institutional to faculty, to students. [GSOC proposal if I recall but not one that was chosen. Moodle has many types of reports and access to the data is readily available; however, some custom reports may need to be created]

12. Excellent ability to collect metacontent, ability to add keywords, tagging, etc.[Moodle has the ability to tag information - I think this was being improved at one point but I do not know the current status of this]

13. Scalability to keep up with new technologies. [I see the scalability of Moodle adopting to or being adapted to new technologies all the time in CONTRIB]

Some of us have been kiddingly discussing the integration, as some other universities have, of Drupal and Moodle as a possible replacement for Angel should that happen. This interesting article adds one more tool, Elgg and offers a nice visual representation of what it would look like.

http://www.funnymonkey.com/together-at-last

Peace - Anthony

One of the common requests we get is for a migration utility. The switching costs are part of what keeps folks on their current systems.

If we can build an automated converter to take Angel backups and port them to Moodle, its a much easier sell.

Martin I had a chance to see a sales pitch for Angel recently and I couple of things stood out as really interesting.

1) Forum grading automation
Angel supports a set of automated grading criteria that can be applied using boolean logic. You can do things like require each student to post 3 times, and get a certain peer rating, and get a certain teacher rating. These can be used in conjunction with manual grading by the teacher of the actual posted content. This also appears to integrate seamlessly with the filtering system. You can also filter forum posts for just a particular forum and grade from the resulting set of posts. You can also mass grade based on these filter sets.

2) Object Repository and User/Group Access Controls
All activities and resources are automatically added to the learning object repository. This is much more than Moodle repository integrations with things like Alfresco that currently only store file/resource objects.

The repository has a very consistent and powerful access system. The main difference with Moodle is that this is that not only can access permissions be set per user, but they can also be set for groups, and any setting for a learning object can be overidden as part of this system.

In its demo Angel highlights how this can be used for accessibility purposes, where a group of visually impaired may be required to be given 2x the time on an assessment as part of University regulations. In Moodle this is very difficult to implement, requiring you to maintain multiple assessments and setup special agregration categories in the grade book. Even once you do this it has been pointed out to me that all students see the grade book entry for the assessment activity for the special needs students.

So basically, site wide groups, and being able to overide all settings of any activity for a user or group.

Additionally teachers can set thier own permissions for objects they create as to who can see them or not see them. Seems to be a pretty powerful capability to sharing learning objects.

3) Rubric integration
They also have a nice rubric integration that (maybe a hack) but that is easy to paste in rubrics via macros into the grade responses to students.